Читать книгу The Wrong Twin - Harry Leon Wilson - Страница 29

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The Penniman house, white, with green blinds, is set back from the maple-and-elm-shaded street, guarded by a white picket fence. Between the house and gate a green lawn was crossed by a gravelled walk, with borders of phlox; beyond the borders, on either side, were flowering shrubs, and at equal distances from the walk, circular beds of scarlet tulips and yellow daffodils. Detached from the Penniman house, but still in the same yard, was a smaller, one-storied house, also white, with green blinds, tenanted by Dave Cowan and his twins, who—in Newbern vernacular—mealed with Mrs. Penniman. It had been the Cowan home when Dave married the Penniman cousin who had borne the twins. There was a path worn in the grass between the two houses.

On the Penniman front porch the judge was throned in a wicker chair. He was a nobly fronted old gentleman, with imposing head, bald at the top but tastefully hung with pale, fluffy side curls. His face was wide and full, smoothly shaven, his cheeks pink, his eyes a pure, pale blue. He was clad in a rumpled linen suit the trousers of which were drawn well up his plump legs above white socks and low black shoes, broad and loose fitting. As the shadows had lengthened and the day cooled he abandoned a palm-leaf fan he had been languidly waving. His face at the moment glowed with animation, for he played over the deciding game in that day's match at checkers by which, at the harness shop, he had vanquished an acclaimed rival from over Higgston way. The fellow had been skilled beyond the average, but supremacy was still with the Newbern champion. So absorbed was he, achieving again that last bit of strategy by which he had gained the place to capture two men and reach the enemy's king row, that his soft-stepping daughter, who had come from the house, had to address him twice.

"Have you had a good day, father?"

The judge was momentarily confused. He had to recall that his invalidism, not his checker prowess, was in question. He regained his presence of mind; he coughed feebly, reaching a hand tenderly back to a point between his shoulder blades.

"Not one of my real bad days, Winona. I can't really say I've suffered. Stuff that other cushion in back of me, will you? I got a new pain kind of in this left shoulder—neuralgia, mebbe. But my sciatica ain't troubled me—not too much."

Winona adjusted the cushion.

"You're so patient, father!"

"I try to be, Winona," which was simple truth.

A sufferer for years, debarred by obscure ailments from active participation in our industrial strife, the judge, often for days at a time, would not complain unless pressed to—quite as if he had forgotten his pains. The best doctors disagreed about his case, none of them able to say precisely what his maladies were. True, one city doctor, a visiting friend of the Pennimans' family physician, had once gone carefully over him, punching, prodding, listening, to announce that nothing ailed the invalid; which showed, as the judge had said to his face, that he was nothing but an impudent young squirt. He had never revealed this parody of a diagnosis to his anxious family, who always believed the city doctor had found something deadly that might at any time carry off the patient sufferer.

The judge was also bitter about Christian Science, and could easily be led to expose its falsity. He would wittily say it wasn't Christian and wasn't science; merely the chuckleheadedness of a lot of women. This because a local adept of the cult had told him, and—what was worse—told Mrs. Penniman and Winona, that if he didn't quit thinking he was an invalid pretty soon he would really have something the matter with him.

And he had incurred another offensive diagnosis: Old Doc Purdy, the medical examiner, whose sworn testimony had years before procured the judge his pension as a Civil War veteran, became brutal about it. Said Purdy: "I had to think up some things that would get the old cuss his money and dummed if he didn't take it all serious and think he did have 'em!"

The judge had been obliged to abandon all thoughts of a career. Years before he had been Newbern's justice of the peace, until a gang of political tricksters defeated the sovereign will of the people. And perhaps he would again have accepted political honours, but none had been offered him. Still, the family was prosperous. For in addition to the pension, Mrs. Penniman kept a neat card in one of the front windows promising "Plain and Fancy Dressmaking Done Here," and Winona now taught school.

Having adjusted the cushion, Winona paused before the cage of a parrot on a stand at the end of the porch. The bird sidled over to her on stiff legs, cocked upon her a leering, yellow eye and said in wheedling tones, "Pretty girl, pretty girl!" But then it harshly screeched, "Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!" This laughter was discordant, cynical, derisive, as if the bird relished a tasteless jest.

Winona went to the hammock and resumed an open book. Its title was "Matthew Arnold—How to Know Him." She was getting up in Matthew Arnold for a paper. Winona at twenty was old before she should have been. She was small and dark, with a thin nose and pinched features. Her dark hair, wound close to her small head, was pretty enough, and her dark eyes were good, but she seemed to carry almost the years of her mother. She was an earnest girl, severe in thought, concerned about her culture, seeking to subdue a nature which she profoundly distrusted to an ideal she would have described as one of elegance and refinement. The dress she wore was one of her best—for an exemplary young man would call that evening, bringing his choice silver flute upon which he would play justly if not brilliantly to Winona's piano accompaniment—but it was dull of tint, one of her mother's plain, not fancy, creations. Still Winona felt it was daring, because the collar was low and sported a fichu of lace. This troubled her, even as she renewed the earnest effort to know Matthew Arnold. She doubtfully fingered at her throat a tiny chain that supported a tiny pendant. She slipped the thing under the neck of her waist. She feared that with her low neck—she thought of it as low—the bauble would be flashy.

Mrs. Penniman came from the kitchen and sat on the porch steps. She was much like Winona, except that certain professional touches of colour at waist, neck, and wrists made her appear, in spirit at least, the younger woman. There were times when Winona suffered herself to doubt her mother's seriousness; times when the woman appeared a slave to levity. She would laugh at things Winona considered no laughing matters, and her sympathy with her ailing husband had come to be callous and matter of fact, almost perfunctory. She longed, moreover, to do fancy dressmaking for her child; and there was the matter of the silk stockings. The Christmas before the too downright Dave Cowan, in a low spirit of banter, had gifted Winona with these. They were of tan silk, and Dave had challenged her to wear them for the good of her soul.

Winona had been quite unpleasantly shocked at Dave's indelicacy, but her mother had been frivolous throughout the affair. Her mother said, too, that she would like to wear silk stockings at all times. But Winona—she spoke of the gift as hose—put the sinister things away at the bottom of her third bureau drawer. Once, indeed, she had nearly nerved herself to a public appearance in them, knowing that perfectly good women often did this. That had been the day she was to read her paper on Early Greek Sculpture at the Entre Nous Club. She had put them on with her new tan pumps, but the effect had been too daring. She felt the ogling eyes. The stockings had gone back to the third bureau drawer—to the bottom—and never had her ankles flashed a silken challenge to a public that might misunderstand.

Yet—and this it was that was making Winona old before her time—always in her secret heart of hearts she did long abjectly to wear silk stockings—all manner of sinful silken trifles. Evil yearnings like this would sweep her. But she took them to be fruits of a natural depravity that good women must fight. Thus far she had triumphed.

Mrs. Penniman now wielded the palm-leaf fan. She eyed her husband with an almost hardened glance, then ran a professional eye over the lines of Winona. Her head moved with quick little birdlike turnings. Her dark hair was less orderly than Winona's, and—from her kitchen work—two spots of colour burned high on her cheeks.

"Your locket's slipped inside your waist," she said, not dreaming that Winona had in shame brought this about.

Winona, who would have been shamed again to explain this, withdrew the bauble. The fond mother now observed the book above which her daughter bent, twisting her neck to follow the title.

"Is it interesting?" she asked; and then: "The way to know a man—cook for him."

Her daughter winced, suffering a swift picture of her too-light mother, cooking for Mr. Arnold.

"I should think you'd pick out a good novel to read," went on her mother. "That last one I got from the library—it's about a beautiful woman that counted the world well lost for love."

Winona murmured indistinctly.

"She didn't—she didn't stop at anything," added the mother, brightly.

"Oh, Mother!"

"I don't care! The Reverend Mallett himself said that novels should be read for an understanding of life—ever novels with a wholesome sex interest. The very words he said!"

"Mother, Mother!" protested Winona with a quick glance at her father.

She doubted if any sex interest could be wholesome; and surely, with both sexes present, the less said about such things the better. To her relief the perilous topic was abandoned.

"I suppose you both heard the big news today."

Mrs. Penniman spoke ingenuously, but it was downright lying—no less. She supposed they had not heard the big news. She was certain they had not. Winona was attentive. Her mother's business of plain and fancy dressmaking did not a little to make the acoustics of Newbern superior. From her clients she gleaned the freshest chronicles of Newbern's social life, many being such as one might safely repeat; many more, Winona uncomfortably recalled, the sort no good woman would let go any further. She hoped the imminent disclosure would not be of the latter class, yet suddenly she wished to hear it even if it were. She affected to turn with reluctance from her budding acquaintanceship with Matthew Arnold.

"It's the twins," began her mother with a look of pleased horror. "You couldn't guess in all day what they've been up to."

"You may be sure Wilbur was the one to blame," put in Winona, quick to defend the one most responsive to her lessons in faith, morals, etiquette.

"Ought to be soundly trounced," declared the judge. "That's what I always say."

"This is the worst yet," continued Mrs. Penniman.

She liked the suspense she had created. With an unerring gift for oral narrative, she toyed with this. She must first tell how she got it.

"You know that georgette waist Mrs. Ed Seaver is having?"

"Have they done something awful?" Winona demanded. "I perfectly well know it wasn't Merle's fault."

"Well, Mrs. Seaver came in about four o'clock for her final fitting, and what do you think?"

"For mercy's sake!" pleaded Winona.

"And Ed Seaver had been to the barber shop to have his hair cut—he always gets it cut the fifteenth of each month—well, he found out all about it from Don Paley, that they'd had to send for to come to the Whipple New Place to cut it neatly off after the way it had been sawed off rough, and she told me word for word. Well, it's unbelievable, and every one saying something ought to be done about it—you just never would be able to guess!"

Winona snapped shut the volume so rich in promise and leaned forward to face her mother desperately. Mrs. Penniman here coughed in a refined and artificial manner as a final preliminary. The parrot instantly coughed in the same manner, and—seeming to like it—again became Mrs. Penniman in a series of mild, throaty preliminary coughs, as if it would presently begin to tell something almost too good. The real tale had to be suspended again for this.

"Well," resumed Mrs. Penniman, feeling that the last value had been extracted from mere suspense, "anyway, it seems that this morning poor little Patricia Whipple was going by the old graveyard, and the twins jumped out and knocked her down and dragged her in there away from the road and simply tore every stitch of clothes off her back and made her dress up in Wilbur's clothes——"

"There!" gasped the horrified Winona. "Didn't I say it would be Wilbur?"

"And then what did they do but cut off her braid with a knife!"

"Wilbur's knife—Merle hasn't any."

"And the Lord knows what the little fiends would have done next, but Juliana Whipple happened to be passing, and heard the poor child's screams and took her away from them."

"That dreadful, dreadful Wilbur!" cried Winona.

"Reform school," spoke the judge, as if he uttered it from the bench.

"But something queer," went on Mrs. Penniman. "Juliana took the twins home in the pony cart, with Wilbur wearing Patricia's dress—it's a plaid gingham I made myself—and someone gave him a lot of money and let him go, and they didn't give Merle any because Ed Seaver saw them on River Street, and Wilbur had it all. And what did Patricia Whipple say to Don Paley but that she was going to have one of the twins for her brother, because no one else would get her a brother, and so she must. But what would she want one of those little cutthroats for? That's what puzzles me."

"Merle is not a cutthroat," said Winona with tightening lips. "He never will be a cutthroat." She left all manner of permissible suspicions about his brother.

"Well, it just beat me!" confessed her mother. "Maybe they've been reading Wild West stories."

"Wilbur, perhaps," insisted Winona. "Merle is already very choice in his reading."

"A puzzle, anyway—why, there they come!"

And the manner of their coming brought more bewilderment to the house of Penniman. For the criminal Wilbur did not come shamed and slinking, but with rather an uplift. Behind him gloomily trod the Merle twin. Even at a distance he was disapproving, accusatory, put upon. It was to be seen that he washed his hands of the evil.

"Whatever in the world—" began Mrs. Penniman, for Wilbur in the hollow of his arm bore a forked branch upon which seemed to perch in all confidence a free bird of the wilds.

"A stuffed bird!" said the peering Winona, and dispelled this illusion.

The twins entered the gate. Midway up the gravelled walk Wilbur Cowan began a gurgling oration.

"I bet nobody can guess what I brought! Yes, sir—a beautiful present for every one—that will make a new man of poor old Judge Penniman, and this lovely orange—that's for Mrs. Penniman—and I bet Winona can't guess what's wrapped up in this box for her—it's the most beautiful album, and this first-class animal for my father, and it'll last a lifetime if he takes care of it good; and I got me a dog to watch the house." Breathless he paused.

"Spent all his money!" intoned Merle. "And he bought me this knife, too."

He displayed it, but merely as a count in the indictment for criminal extravagance. He had gone to the hammock to sit by Winona. He needed her. He had been too long unconsidered.

The sputtering gift-bringer bestowed the orange upon Mrs. Penniman, the album upon Winona, and the invigorator upon the now embarrassed judge.

"Thank you, Wilbur, dear!" Mrs. Penniman was first to recover her poise.

"Thanks ever so much," echoed Winona, doubtfully.

She must first know that he had come by this money righteously. The judge adjusted spectacles to read the label on his gift.

"Thank you, my boy. The stuff may give me temporary relief."

He had felt affronted that any one could suppose one bottle of anything would make a new man of him; and—inconsistently enough—affronted that any one should suppose he needed to be made a new man of. He had not liked the phrase at all.

"And now perhaps you will tell us——" began Winona, her lips again tightening. But the Wilbur twin could not yet be brought down to mere history.

"This is an awful fighting dog," he was saying. "He's called Frank, and he eats them up. Yes, sir, he nearly et up that old Boodles dog just now. He would of if I hadn't stopped him. He minds awful well."

"Spent all our money!" declaimed Merle in a public-school voice, using "our" for the first time since his defeat of the morning. Certain of Winona's support, it had again become their money. "And cursing, swearing, fighting, smoking!"

"Oh, Wilbur!" exclaimed the shocked Winona; yet there was dismay more than rebuke in her tone, for she had brought the album to view. "If you've been a bad boy perhaps I should not accept this lovely gift from you. Remember—we don't yet know how you obtained all this money."

"Ho! I earned that money good! That old fat Mr. Whipple said I earned it good. He said he wouldn't of done what I done——"

"Did, dear!"

"—wouldn't of did what I did for twice the money."

"And what was it you did?"

Winona spoke gently, as a friend. But Wilbur rubbed one bare foot against and over the other. He was not going to tell that shameful thing, even to these people.

"Oh, I didn't do much of anything," he muttered.

"But what was it?"

The judge interrupted.

"It says half a wineglassful before meals. Daughter, will you bring me the wineglass?"

The Pennimans kept a wineglass. The judge found a corkscrew attached to the bottle, and sipped his draft under the absorbed regard of the group. "It feels like it might give some temporary relief," he admitted, savoring the last drops.

"You go right down to the drug store and look at that picture; you'll see then what it'll do for you," urged the donor.

"What else did the Whipples say to you?" wheedled Winona.

The Wilbur twin again hung embarrassed.

"Well—well, there's a cruel stepmother, but now she wasn't cruel to me. She said I was a nice boy, and gave me back my pants."

"Gave you back—"

Winona enacted surprise.

"I had to have my pants, didn't I? I couldn't go out without any, could I? And she took me to a pantry and give me a big hunk of cake with raisins in it, and a big slice of apple pie, and a big glass of milk."

"I must say! And she never gave me a thing!" Merle's bitterness grew.

"And she kissed me twice, and—and said I was a nice boy."

"You already said that," reminded the injured brother.

"And she didn't act cruel to me once, even if she is a stepmother."

"But how did you come to be without your——"

Wilbur was again reprieved from her grilling. The Penniman cat, Mouser, a tawny, tigerish beast, had leaped to the porch. With set eyes and quivering tail it advanced crouchingly, one slow step at a time, noiseless, sinister. Only when poised for its final spring upon the helpless prey was it seen that Mouser stalked the blue jay on its perch. Wilbur, with a cry of alarm, snatched the treasure from peril. Mouser leaped to the porch railing to lick her lips in an evil manner.

"You will, will you?" Wilbur stormed at her. Yet he was pleased, too, for Mouser's attempt was testimony to the bird's merit. "She thought it was real," he said, proudly.

"But how did you come to have your clothes——" began Winona sweetly once more, and again the twin was saved from shuffling answers.

The dog, Frank, sniffing up timidly at Mouser on the porch rail, displeased her. From her perch she leaned down to curse him hissingly, with arched back and swollen tail, a potent forearm with drawn claws curving forward in menace.

"You will, will you?" demanded Wilbur again, freeing his legs from the leash in which the dismayed dog had entwined them.

Frank now fell on his back with limp paws in air and simpered girlishly up at his envenomed critic on the railing.

"We got to keep that old cat out the way. He eats 'em up—that's all he does, eats 'em! It's a good thing I was here to make him mind me."